When lives are at stake

Saturday

Oct 13, 2012 at 12:01 AM

The danger in Romney's plan is not in the few cuts he has detailed but in the many he has not.

DANA MILBANK

The Obama campaign's new ad ruffles my feathers. It's not the message per se. The Big Bird spot fairly points out that Mitt Romney seems more interested in cracking down on "Sesame Street" than on Wall Street. The problem is President Obama has, to mix animal metaphors, taken the bait.

The threat presented by Romney's budget is not in the few cuts he has specified but in the vastly larger amount of cuts he has yet to identify. At the Denver debate, Romney said he would eliminate Obamacare (doing so would actually increase the budget deficit, because of related tax hikes) and the public-broadcasting subsidy, which is $445 million a year — or little more than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of federal spending. But Romney proposes to cut federal spending by more than $5 trillion over the next decade. That threatens much more than Muppets. Human lives are at stake. As if to remind us of this, Rep. Darrell Issa, the indefatigable Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called a hearing for noon Wednesday even though Congress is in a weeks-long recess. The emergency cause for the hearing? Probing lapses in diplomatic security that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya. The purpose of the pre-election hearing, presumably, is to embarrass the administration for inadequate diplomatic security. But Issa seems unaware of the irony that diplomatic security is inadequate partly because of budget cuts forced by his fellow Republicans in Congress. For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.9 billion for the State Department's Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration's request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration's request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans' proposed cuts to her department would be "detrimental to America's national security" — a charge Republicans rejected. Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan's budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014. The Romney campaign argues that such extrapolations are unfair, because Romney and Ryan haven't specified which programs they would cut and by how much. And that's the problem: The danger in Romney's plan is not in the few cuts he has detailed but in the many he has not. If Romney follows through on the tax cuts he has endorsed, increases defense spending by $2.1 trillion over a decade as promised and maintains Social Security and Medicare as they are for those 55 and older, he'd need to cut everything else government does by nearly a third — or more than $200 billion — in 2016. Obama is making a mistake in allowing the discussion to be about Big Bird, which he continued to do on Monday. In the presidential campaign, Big Bird is a distraction from Romney's real cuts, which he is not yet allowing Americans to see.